The nearly 500 attendees of CSEdCon at the Thursday morning opening plenary.

CSEdCon 2019 trip report: a deep dive into CS education policy

There are a lot of conferences related to computing education right now. There are all of the academic conferences, including ACM’s SIGCSE, ICER, ITiCSE, WiPCSE, Koli Calling, K-12 oriented conferences like CSTA and the CS for All Symposium, and dozens of regional conferences that bring together educators of all kinds.

This week, I went to yet another kind of CS education conference specifically focused on K-12 CS education policy and implementation issues. The conference, organized by Code.org, CSTA, and ECEP, brought together state leaders in policy and non-profits, policy makers, school administrators, and many other contributors to CS for All efforts, to share and learn from each other in our shared mission to integrate computing into public education.

I came with 3 of my wonderful Washington state leadership team members, Shannon Thissen (OSPI), Ann Wright-Mockler (PNNL), and Tammie Schrader (ESD 101). These weren’t all of the voices on our team, but they spanned state government, regional districts, higher education, and research.

The conference was held in Las Vegas, and it was my first time there. I wasn’t really prepared for the 100 degree weather or the 60 degree air conditioned interiors. I came bracing myself for a lot of listening, a lot of learning, and a bit of sharing about my own experiences engaging in CS education policy work in Washington state.

Interestingly, the conference had several distinct groups: district partners who were coming to learn how to implement CS education in their districts; regional partners, who were planning at the level of multiple districts in a state; and state policy people, like myself, who are thing at the level of the entire state. The first two groups started meeting Monday and Tuesday, and the policy group, which I was in, started Wednesday afternoon.

Most of Wednesday afternoon was about supporting our state team’s strategic planning.

Wednesday afternoon

The beginning of the policy focus was full of fascinating content, all aimed at helping our state teams do strategic planning around equitable K-12 CS education. The session began with a presentation of a new framework for thinking about equity called Capacity, Access, Participation, and Experience (CAPE). The general idea of the framework is that there’s a sequence of components that need to consider equity issues:

• A school or district or state’s capacity to teach (do all districts have teachers who can teach, policies in place, funding?).
• Access to CS education (are all schools are actually offering courses, or CS integration in courses, to a degree that every student can take them?).
• Participation in CS education (are all students from underrepresent groups actually taking courses?).
• And experience in CS education (are all students from underrepresented groups actually learning, developing interest, and feeling welcomed?).

We discussed using this framework to demonstrate different types of data that can be gathered to reveal equity issues across a state, using his state of Texas as an example. He gave us a framework for evaluating our state-level broadening participation in computing efforts.

We discussed the wide range of unintended consequences of policy, including examples like the unintended consequences of zero-tolerance policies, which actually increased racial disparities in who was disciplined; standardized testing, which passed pressure from state to schools to teachers to students, ultimately increasing student anxiety; and 1 to 1 iPads in Los Angeles, which, when deployed without training, had essentially no impact. The organizers challenged us to anticipate unintended consequences, watch mindfully for them, and problem solve around them with further policy.

Anne Leftwich (IU Bloomington) talked about the importance of data, but the equal importance of controlling narratives around data. She gave examples of how the data they had in Indiana said one thing, but that others used Indiana’s data to tell very different stories, sometimes over- or mis-interpreting the data.

Jeff Forbes (Duke, NSF) talked about NSF’s accomplishments in CS education (AP CS Principles, Exploring Computer Science, Bootstrap, basic research on diversity and equity), and it’s coming strategic planning about how to scale some of these intitiatves to all states and districts in the United States in an equity-centered and evidence-based way, while advancing deeper understanding of CS teaching and learning.

We spent the rest of the day working together in our state team, and learning from other state teams, trying to develop our policy priorities for the next few years. We structured our brainstorming around the CAPE framework, and trying to identify outcomes that would guide our policy goals, and how we might achieve them. Here are some of the outcomes we brainstormed:

• Experience: One long term goal we identified was trying to ensure that all of the students across our state, especially those from groups underrepresented in computing, experience such enriching and inspiring CS learning that they passionately recommend CS learnig to their closest friends. This includes not just people majoring in CS, but every student in higher education, independent of discipline. This requires excellent, inclusive CS teaching at both K-12 and higher education level.
• Participation: Achieving the experience goal requires that the students who participate in higher education CS represent the racial, gender, geographic, disability, and socioeconomic diversity of our state. This requires partnership with higher education to measure these outcomes, but also creating clear pathways through K-12 and on to 2-year and 4-year colleges.
• Access: Before reaching that participation goal, a critical outcome is getting every school at every level in Washington state to offer CS in some way, integrated into primary education, and in secondary, into STEM education, or as standalone courses. Doing this equitably means ensuring that all of these opportunities are consistently offered to all students, and that academic advisors ensure that every student is allowed and encouraged to enroll.
• Capacity: To achieve the access goals, one necessary outcome is that that are teachers at every school who can teach CS to all students, advisors who can equitably guide all students to CS, and students and parents who know enough about CS that all students view CS as an interesting, viable thing to study. This requires clear pathways, teacher retention, and an incredible amount of training.

Washington state, like most states in the United States, are still working on these capacity and access goals. Based on the best data we have so far, fewer than 40% of schools in Washington state are offering CS in some form. And yet, in places where CS is being offered, participation and experience goals are hardly being met, given the small scale of offerings. Achieving these goals, especially with a largely volunteer coalition of advocates, is daunting, but essential. One of the most difficulty challenges is deciding what strategic priorities will get us there, and what policies we need to help us get there.

Hadi Partovi gives an inspiring personal story, our collective success, and our community’s shared goals.

Thursday

Thursday morning opened with a plenary from our hosts and organizers. It began with a welcome from state senator Joyce Woodhouse (Nevada, district 5), who talked about policy accomplishments of unanimously supported funding for professional development, and a call to collaborate, implement, and inform legislators on policy needs. Then, Nevada state Governor Steve Sisolak talked about the fundamental importance of CS in Nevada, including the hospitality and mining industry’s need for data scientists, programmers, and cybersecurity analysts.

Next, Hadi Partovi (Founder, CEO, Code.org) shared his personal story of growing up in Iran during the Iranian revolution. He spent most of his childhood in fear of the government, experiencing racism and immigration barriers when moving to America, and the central role of education helping him succeed despite the immense instability in his childhood. He talked about how lucky he feels every day, and how is driving motivation is to ensure that youth who might be young women, students of color, people from low-income households, rural communities, who might night speak English, have computers, or access to the internet, can all have the opportunity to learn about computing. He called upon our community to target shared goals of having every school in the U.S. teach CS by 2025 and have every student in the U.S. learn CS by 2030. These are very much in line with our strategic goals in Washington state, but there’s a lot of work to get there.

Leann Sudol-DeLyser Anne Leftwich, and Jake Baskin reflecting.

After Hadi, there was a brief panel of diverse experts who reflected on our progress. Leann Sudol-DeLyser (CSforAll) talked about how critical it has been to shift from individual people bootstrapping CS education in isolation to a community working together to achieve bigger things at scale. Anne (ECEP, IU Bloomington) talked about our biggest challenge being how to reach all of the youth that we haven’t been reaching—70% of youth that simply don’t participate in CS education. Jake Baskin (CSTA President) talked about needing to deal with CS teacher isolation, and continuing professional development. Leann then turned to equity and talked about math education being universal, but still not equitable: students aren’t necessary getting the same opportunities in math, and teachers aren’t necessarily equally well-prepared; the same challenges are inevitably at play in CS education.

Peter shared his story about teaching in Kenya.

In the spirit of equity, Peter Tabichi, a math and physics teacher from Kenya, closed the session. Code.org awarded him with the 2019 Global Teacher award for his work reaching underserved youth in his community remote, poor, drought-prone region of Nakuru, Kenya. There was one computer for the whole school with weak internet connectivity. The classrooms are overcrowded. He never had an opportunity to learn about computer science in his education. And yet, he and his students are passionate about learning CS, and so he took the initiative to learn some programming online and independently.

Sheela kicks off the session.

After the plenary, I went to the state of computer science education policy session. Sheela VanHoose from Code.org was our ringleader, challenging us to develop policy priorities for our states. Cameron Wilson (Code.org COO) talked about the state of policy around the United States. We reflected on our state wins (CS education data reporting, requiring all high schools to offer CS by 2022, state funding for professional development). States across the nation have made similar progress, each time with a broad coalition, legislative and executive champions, and the hard work of many passionate volunteers. Cameron also talked about federal funding: the Department of Education set aside EIR grants for CS education. The big gaps are still rural access and participation of students of color. That’s where are time and energy needs to go.

Looking forward, there are many other policy priorities to consider:

• There are now many different teacher certification exams (NES, Praxis), and we need to prepare teachers for them.
• Pre-service is fundamental to sustainable CS education across the country. There are some nascent efforts, but we need to get started.
• We need to work much harder at getting districts on board that aren’t currently excited about CS education.
• We have no plan for how CS might respond to the growing population of K-12 students with interest in computing. We’re generating demand with no plan to meet it.

The 2019 State of Computer Science Education report, the third in three years, was a partnership between Code.org, CSTA, and ECEP, and is a tome of policy information about K-12 CS education in the state. It’s a huge lift to bring together this data, and actually quite valuable for informing national and state efforts. We spent the rest of the session celebrating some of the successes reported in the document.

After the policy roundup, we held a networking session for all of the folks from Washington state, to help us connect and plan together. My team met several attendees, one from Puyallup beginning to advocate for more CS in her school district, and one from AVID, who will be offering CS professional development around Washington state. We brainstormed many critical questions for our state, including the need for broader networking, more information for our website, the need for sustainable PD, the lack of clarity about the division of responsibilities between our office of the state superintended and our state education board, and time as a scarce resource for making progress on all of this.

Karen Brennan talks about her research on assessment.

After lunch, I attended a roundtable conversation about questions that program implementors wish they had answers to. There were questions about what computer science is, how CS overlaps with other standards like NGSS and Common Core, what K-12 CS education policies best catalyze progress, how to measure effective CS teaching, and why some districts are so ready to teach CS while others aren’t? Chris Stephenson (Google) talked about CS-ER research grants. She focused in particular on the importance of proposals that are responsive to the practical needs of K-12 CS education implementation. Several researchers presented some of their work that fit some of these goals, including work on K-12 teacher assessment, integration of CS into the arts, socially-relevant problem-based learning in CS, sustainable teacher professional development, and collective impact professional development models for rural areas. It was great to hear about work of direct relevance to implementing K-12 C education.

The state coalition building panel, including representatives fro Rhode Island, Georgia, Puerto Rico, and Washington state.

After the research session, I served on a panel about state coalition building and advocacy. We covered four topics: history, stakeholders, strategy, and sustainability. Here are some of the insights that I shared and others that I found valuable from the other panelists:

• History. Every state has a history; advocacy has to be done in the context of it, and the context of the advocates who are already doing work. Very rarely does any state start from scratch.
• Stakeholders. Representation is such a huge challenge; sometimes the people we want to represent the state from underserved areas just don’t exist; other times, they’re too busy dealing with bigger equity issues. Ensuring that all of the voices are at the table, even if they have little time, is key.
• Strategy. Broadening participation in computing requires setting ambitious goals about equity, but then finding out what’s possible within existing power structures. Keeping those big goals about equity, and keeping them at the center, is key to making progress.
• Sustainability. Sustainability is just as much about time, self-care, and emotions, as it is about funding.

My last session of the day was with all the folks from Washington state. We decided to spend some of our time sketching out a state plan for K-12 CS education, to help organize and focus our efforts in the state. We discussed several elements that our plan needed to include:

• A clear goal, such as all students to learn concepts in CS and how they relate to their lives and other learning.
• A clear definition of CS that supports the teaching of both dedicated CS courses, but also integrations of CS into other disciplines.
• Goals for teacher capacity in 1) primary education, 2) secondary CS education, and 3) secondary education in other subjects that integrate CS. We want all schools to have CS-certified primary educators, CS-certified eduators, and secondary educators of all kinds with knowledge of opportunities for CS integration. This requires long-term investment in pre-service teacher education.
• Certification policy that is compatible with pre-service, including separating endorsement requirements for K-5 and 5-12.
• Experience in classrooms that lead to all students in primary and secondary school students meeting standard standards in computer science, while also triggering interest in CS at all levels.
• Diversity in CS, indicated by students completing CS electives being representative of each school’s demographics along race, gender identity, disability, and socioeconomic status.
• Strategies for demand generation, including administrators who want CS eduators, higher education programs that want to create pre-service programs, industry demand for better graduates, and parent demand for learning opportunities.
• Pathways from high school to higher education, including articulation agreements for admissions requirements, and higher education outreach from 2-year and 4-year colleges.
• Infrastructure to measure all of the above to drive policy, funding, and progress.

Friday

I had breakfast with Pat Yongpradit and chatted about some of the requirements for launching pre-service programs, including faculty, scholarships, advising support, and time to iterate. He was particularly curious about the many paths to making pre-service happen, including combinations of demand generation through policy, and funding through tate and federal sources.

The panel on the role of teachers in advocacy.

After breakfast, I attended a session on the role of teachers in advocacy. Bryan Cox (CS specialist, Georgia Department of Education). He facilitated a conversation with several teachers with advocacy experience: Daryl Detrick (a teacher in NJ who has helped with CSTA), Jackie Corricelli (a teacher in CT who has done community organizing and data gathering), Dan Schneider (a teacher in AZ, who has helped with endorsements). They talked about about surprisingly simple advocacy actions like reaching out to politicians about CS, or inviting legislators to CS classrooms, have had big impacts. They also talked about the need for community building in order to gather data to support policy. They also talked about the importance of teachers being involved at every level of standards development and implementation. There was a strong sentiment that we need to teach teachers to teach computer science, really from the premise that teaching is much harder than learning CS content. It was fascinating to hear perspectives on the advocacy work I’ve been doing, but from the teacher perspective. I was surprised to find that there was a large degree of overlap, with only a slight difference in which issues were most salient in the work.

The opening slide of the teacher certification pathways.

The next session was on teacher certification, which was a panel with four folks engage in building teacher certification pathways, Helen Hu (Westminster College, Utah), Anne Ottenbreit-Leftwich (Indiana), Jennifer Rosato (NCCSE/College of St. Scholastic), Kelly Stanton (Alabama State Department of Education). They started with the national landscape, showing that there are 37 states + the District of Columbia that have a CS certification (with several of these iterating on the certification to make it more accessible), and with 19 states with pre-service program incentives. Nevada and Connecticut just required all pre-service teachers to have some CS education training; Arkansas has had it in place for several years for all primary educators. Code.org also shared several examples of pathway structures.

Several panelists talked about their specific states, all of which were surprisingly diverse and complex:

• Utah: CS is an add on endorsement that they earned as in-service teachers. Teachers who are already teaching at their school apply for a state-approved endorsement plan and they have 2 years to complete it, while they’re teaching the course. The problem is that there were 5 CS course they had to take in 2 years to earn that endorsement, which wasn’t quite enough time. They changed to 3 courses, which made it more viable. The Exploring CS path required Exploring CS professional development, Code.org CS fundamentals PD, and an industry test (Certiport IC3). The level 1 and level 2 endorsements added on CS courses, industry tests, and other forms of CS PD, and certified teachers to teach AP CSP, and Computer programming 1 and 2, and AP CS A with more CS content courses. This simpler requirements led to rapid growth in certification.
• Alabama: They require 2 years of teaching experience and the CS Praxis exam. They also have add an “adjunct” permit which allows people to teach no more than 1/3 of a day in a subject area. They also have degree equivalents from industry, which starts off with an occupational proficiency which comes from “A+” certification or the Praxis. They also have a provisional route for people who haven’t been prepared as teachers, who can take methods courses in math or science. Then there’s a “permit” path which has courses that give them 3 years to teach, then they have to prove proficiency to renew. And then Athens and the University of Alabama are developing pre-service programs.
• Indiana: Ann Leftwich has focused on developing an Educational Technology course, which is required for all elementary teachers. They’ve focused 3 weeks on computational thinking and computer science, which define these two ideas, how it fits within their subject area and grade level, and how to explore and evaluate tools t support learning. They end the class module by creating resources that address CS standards. There’s a “Computer Education” license is an add-on, which requires an HTML/CSS/Scratch class, a Python class, a CS teaching methods class, and a Networking, Software, and Hardware class (because of the Pearson test, which will soon be Praxis), plus a 6 week CS student teaching course. They’ve been teaching 7–12 students a year for the past 5 years.
• Minnesota: Jen Rosato talked about an online certificate in computer science education, with a CT course, a CS Principles course, a Java course, and a capstone. Teachers from across the country take it to prepare for certification. They’ve focused on ensuring all pre-service teachers learn a bit about CS; this has been hard because they have so many different certification pathways. The course they use has a broad coverage of CS standards, CS teaching methods, and alignment between science standards and CS. They’ve also included some CS in the diversity, equity, and inclusion course. Finally, they have a minor in computer science education for undergraduates.

The panel talked about some of the biggest challenges being budget cuts in Colleges of Education, and the administrative burden of building and maintaining programs. What’s helped has been external funding, partnerships focused on computer science education, and mentorship around administrative work. They also raised challenges around demand—some pre-service programs have struggled to finding the minimum number of students to enroll. There was a broad discussion about whether CS pedagogy can be successfully taught online; there were some ideas of teaching vignettes that they record and provide peer feedback on. There’s clearly a lot of research to do on how to actually prepare teachers for CS pedagogy across all levels.

The last session I attended on Friday was with Code.org and a group of other policy-focused people on what policies Code.org should advocate for beyond the 9 policy ideas that they have initially focused on. Our conversation didn’t go far beyond the 9 existing policies, but focused a lot more on the maturity of interpretation, implementation, and enforcement of these policies. There were fascinating discussions about the interplay between iterations on policy.

Reflection

Policy is hard. Really hard. Almost intractably hard. And yet, I’m leaving the conference with new relationships, new ideas, and and a renewed sense of my team and it’s capacity to make progress. My next steps? Follow up on all of those new relationships, capture all of our new priorities, synthesize everything I’ve learned into our next steps, and picking a few priorities to make progress on in the next few years. It’s a marathon, not a sprint!